Another Misleading Article
Less than half of published scientists endorse global warming theory
Sounds like a victory for Climate Change deniers, but what is the actual data they are citing?
Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers "implicit" endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no "consensus."
Now if you are totally ignorant of how science works, you may find it odd that most papers don’t bother to accept or reject the hypothesis of human-induced climate change. Science by its very nature is supposed to be neutral, so unless one is studying the cause of global warming, bringing up human contributions to it is unnecessary from a scientific viewpoint. There’s no indication that any of the studies, even the paltry 6% that actually reject the consensus, say that climate change isn’t occurring. Even the story itself admits the globe is warming, even if they want to pretend that humans somehow have nothing to do with it.
More to the point, the study looked at the papers and treated those who didn’t give an implicit or explicit opinion as though the scientists themselves were rejecting the consensus on climate change. If they didn’t have an agenda and actually wanted to determine what the truth was, they could have contacted the authors of those papers and asked them. After all, the title of the article speaks about published scientists, not their papers. Why not ask all of these published scientists what their view is on humans causing climate change?
I’m betting it is because then they would have to change the headline.
